Overview

Pin is a dynamic binary instrumentation framework for the IA-32, x86-64 and MIC instruction-set architectures that enables the creation of dynamic program analysis tools. Some tools built with Pin are VTune Amplifier XE, Inspector XE, Advisor XE and SDE. The tools created using Pin, called Pintools, can be used to perform program analysis on user space applications on Linux, Windows and OS X*. As a dynamic binary instrumentation tool, instrumentation is performed at run time on the compiled binary files. Thus, it requires no recompiling of source code and can support instrumenting programs that dynamically generate code.

Pin provides a rich API that abstracts away the underlying instruction-set idiosyncrasies and allows context information such as register contents to be passed to the injected code as parameters. Pin automatically saves and restores the registers that are overwritten by the injected code so the application continues to work. Limited access to symbol and debug information is available as well.

Pin was originally created as a tool for computer architecture analysis, but its flexible API and an active community (called "Pinheads") have created a diverse set of tools for security, emulation and parallel program analysis.

Distribution

Pin is proprietary software developed and supported by Intel and is supplied free of charge for non-commercial use. Pin includes the source code for a large number of example instrumentation tools like basic block profilers, cache simulators, instruction trace generators, etc. It is easy to derive new tools using the examples as a template.

Quick Links

Getting Started

The best way to get started is to read the user's manual. Pin developers also regularly organize tutorials and workshops. They are held at conferences and universities.

Technical Support

If you have specific questions after reading the user's manual, you should first check the FAQ page. If that doesn't answer your question, you can search through the archives of the Pinheads newsgroup to see if anyone else asked your question. Finally, if that doesn't solve your problem, feel free to post a message to the newsgroup (don't forget to include your Pin kit number, operating system, processor, and gcc version).

13 comments

Hi, we are studying an open source tool based Pin tool version 2.2 for linux developed by a professor almost 10 years ago, so we need the version 2.2 of Pin tool for Linux. And where we can download this version?
Thank you!

We are trying to use Intel PIN on OS X 10.10 (Yosemite). Around a year back, Intel used to distribute a PIN version pin-2.13-62732-clang.4.2-mac that used to work on OS X platform. However, we do not this version being distributed now, and nor is any version specific to the OS X platform. Is it the case that Intel has merged the tarballs of OS X and Linux together? If not, then has Intel completely discontinued its support for the OS X platform?

We tried installing the two PIN (linux) versions that are available on Intel PIN's download page:

While Intel PIN's 2.14-67254 has been shown to be compatible only with the older versions of OS X (really old ones I must say), 3.0-76991 has been shown to be compatible with OS X 10.10. We are facing some basic issues with this version too (while running the make in source/tools/ManualExamples):

In source/tools/Config/makefile.config file, TARGET_OS is set to linux and COMPILER is set to gcc. This should be set based on the platform. We have fixed this file manually.

The Makefile in the source/tools/ManualExamples does not compile saying that the cc_used_ia32e_m.CVH file could not be found. Note that this file used to be shipped with pin-2.13-62732-clang.4.2-mac.

The pin executable in the root folder of Pin's tarball is for Linux (does not work on OS X).

PS: We are using Intel PIN as a feeder to our architectural simulator Tejas. Hence, our simulator has a dependency on Intel PIN's support. If you have recently stopped releasing newer versions of Intel PIN, could you at least allow interested users to download the older (pin-2.13-62732-clang.4.2-mac) version on your Downloads page.

trying to running an application with Intel SDE 7.21.0 tool which includes newest pin tool Pin 2.14 kit 72480 but still don't know if because Windows 10 RTM or app compiled using VS2015 RTM get an error:

I am Trying to set up pin pin-2.12-58423-msvc10-windows with visual studio 2012 but it doesn't give me any solution, plz give me the step by step information about this kit how to set up and use it. the error given pinvm.dll does not exist, pinvm already present in pin kit but still it shows such type of errors. I refer pin user guide I cant understand it .............

I also try with Cygwin but doesn't any way to get solution to use this kit.